Who
Are the Bombers?by Jim Lobe
October 28, 2003

Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's weekend tour of Iraq appeared to
be going splendidly: everywhere he went  even in Saddam Hussein's
former stronghold of Tikrit  Iraqis greeted him with smiles and
warm handshakes, no doubt adding to his conviction that the war really
was for "liberation" rather than "occupation."

Until
Sunday morning, that is, when the Pentagon's chief Iraq hawk was rudely
awakened by an unprecedented missile barrage fired from a home-made
rocket launcher less than half a kilometer  and well within the
capital's heavily-patrolled "green zone"  from the Al
Rashid Hotel where he was sleeping.

A U.S.
colonel sleeping on a floor just below Wolfowitz's was killed in an
attack that wounded at least 16 others and proved to be a mere foretaste
of a much more devastating series of co-ordinated car bombings carried
out early Monday on four police stations and the headquarters of the
International Red Cross (ICRC) in Baghdad.

At least
40 people were killed and well over 200 more injured in the blasts,
making it the worst day of violence in the capital since US forces captured
Baghdad in early April.

President
George W. Bush, meeting with Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Chief
Jerry Bremer III, insisted Monday that the attacks were merely signs
of "desperation" on the part of "terrorists" opposed
to the US presence in Iraq, who were motivated by anger over the progress
made by occupation authorities in restoring normal life and creating
a free society.

"There
are terrorists in Iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop
our progress," Bush said. "The more successful we are on the
ground, the more these killers will react."

But to
more impartial analysts, the one-two punch by anti-U.S. forces suggested
that, if anything, resistance to the occupation is growing and becoming
more coordinated and sophisticated.

Until
now, US officials have contended that resistance is confined to die-hard
loyalists  or what the Pentagon often refers to as "dead-enders"
 of ousted President Saddam Hussein, foreign "jihadis"
inspired by or associated with the al-Qaeda terrorist group and common
criminals, several thousand of whom were released from prison in a general
amnesty just before the U.S.-led invasion.

Such a
characterization naturally suggests that the resistance lacks any legitimacy.

But this
description appears increasingly at odds with accounts by journalists
who have interviewed men identified as resistance fighters, very few
of whom have had good words to say about Saddam, as well as recent statements
by US military officers on the ground.

They maintain
that troops either do not really know who is behind the attacks or that
they suspect resistance is much more broadly based than the official
rhetoric suggests.

"The
attacks are being committed by three broad categories of guerrillas,
none with close ties to Saddam," wrote Hassan Fattah, a Baghdad-based
journalist, for The New Republic in July.

In addition
to former lower-ranking Baathists, the two major groups, according to
Fattah and other reporters, include conservative predominantly Sunni
tribesmen, increasingly angry at disrespectful behavior by US troops,
and an indigenous Islamist group, the best-known arm of which is "Mohammed's
Army."

All of
them are opposed to US occupation, and their ranks appear to be growing
as the larger population becomes increasingly disaffected by the US
presence, according to recent reports.

Indeed,
despite arrests and round-ups of thousands of suspected fighters over
the last several months, the number of attacks on US forces has doubled
over the past two months, to well over 20 a day.

And, after
a relatively peaceful September, the toll they are taking in US lives
has surged over the past two weeks to an average of just about one a
day.

"It
is my impression that the guerrilla campaign against us is spreading
and intensifying, and the other side does not seem to be losing enough
people in the process," the former Middle East analyst for the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the first Gulf war, Walter
Lang, told the New York Times recently.

Already
in August indications were worrisome, according to John Zogby, whose
polling group conducted a major door-to-door survey in four major Iraqi
cities. Three in five Iraqis said they wanted to be left alone to work
out a future government, while one-half predicted the United States
will hurt Iraq over the next five years, compared to 36 percent who
said it will help.

Earlier
this month, just under one-half of some 1,620 representative Iraqis
around the country said they considered coalition forces to be liberators
or peacekeepers when they first arrived. Now, according to the survey,
which was commissioned by the International Republican Institute (IRI),
that percentage has fallen to 19, with 10 percent willing to tell pollsters
that they "strongly opposed" the coalition's presence.

Worse,
the perception of US troops as occupiers has grown most sharply in Shi'a
and Kurdish cities, which, in contrast to the so-called "Sunni
Triangle," have been seen as the most pro-coalition areas of the
country.

Those
statistics are contributing to the notion that Washington now faces
a real insurgency  even one that has no explicit political ideology
other than being anti-occupation  as opposed to a terrorism campaign
carried out by a small and ever-diminishing group of die-hards and foreign
Islamists.

The rhetoric
around the resistance is already changing, as even neo-conservative
war-boosters who predicted US forces would be greeted as "liberators"
by the Iraqi population and did not conceive of an active post-war resistance
have begun recognizing that opposition to occupation has a broader popular
base than they anticipated.

Tom Donnelly
of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Garry
Schmitt, director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
have now called on Washington to launch a major counter-insurgency campaign
based on the experience of US Marines in the Caribbean Basin and the
Philippines in the first half of the 20th century.

Instead
of using big-unit search-and-destroy missions as in Vietnam, they said,
the military should "swamp a given area in order to root out insurgents
and their supporting infrastructure."

Such operations
could require increasing overall US troop levels in Iraq.

But if,
as a growing number of military analysts believe, Washington now faces
a real insurgency, fighting it effectively might simply be too costly,
both financially and politically, according to retired Army Colonel
Andrew Bacevich of Boston University.

He has
called instead for the administration to reduce its expectations of
installing democracy in Iraq and the Middle East, give greater authority
to the United Nations for administering the occupation if it will accept
the mission, and to begin reducing US troop numbers according to a schedule
that will make clear "this is not a neo-colonial occupation of
indefinite duration."

Jim
Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's
correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau. He has followed the ups
and downs of neo-conservatives since the well before their rise in the
aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.